St Joseph's Transitional Care Unit

In addition to faring well overall, this facility earned nearly flawless government inspections. Therefore, it received one of our best grades in that area with an A+. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility an A+. Nursing grades are based largely on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provides 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also was dominant in the category of short-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The last area we rated is long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of A. This rounded out a very favorable profile. Only a select few nursing homes earned an A- or better in every category. For prospective residents looking for a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. It does not appear that this nursing home provided information on its vaccination levels. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.